Now you may say, haven't there been enough Dracula appearances lately? What with Dracula 2000, Dracula II: Ascension, Dracula 3000 and Dracula III: Legacy, aren't we pretty much done with Dracula? Apparently not, because director Alex Proyas (Dark City) is working on Dracula: Year Zero, a prequel story about the origins of the vampire in medieval times. Calling it a composite of the Vlad the Impaler legend and Bram Stoker's mythology, Proyas says it will be "all the cool bits out of Francis Coppola's Dracula." I assume he means it will be similar to that, and not 15-20 minutes of Gary Oldman in body armor. I mean, that's cool and all, but I own that on DVD.

The Invisible Man has also not been idle, with several see-through heroes appearing on the big screen recently: i.e., Memoirs of an Invisible Man, where he's hunted by the U.S. government; Hollow Man II, where he's a killer for the U.S. government; and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he gets drafted by the British government. But writer/director David S. Goyer (who's already tackled Dracula in Blade: Trinity) has released more info about his sequel to the original Universal Studios Invisible Man movie, in which the nephew of the original character gets... drafted by the British government and sent to Imperial Russia? Not that an actually good version of League would be a bad thing (hell, they're already making a new Dorian Gray movie), but this feels like treaded ground. Speaking of treaded ground, Goyer also directed The Invisible, about an invisible teen-age spirit trying to guide people to his dying body. As much as I don't care about young Magneto, Goyer, maybe you should do X-Men Origins: Magneto instead.

So where are Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon in all of this? If these in-the-works films turn out to be lifeless and unprofitable, we may have to settle for their pseudo-appearances in the impending remake of Monster Squad. But hopefully, The Wolfman will, indeed, have nards.